Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis

by Gerald Hanley

  Chapter 5

  IT DOES NOT FOLLOW that because all the suicides I knew were very serious, earnest men with little sense of humour, that only the humourless kill themselves when they are in good physical health and still young. We do not know the size and strength of our own manias until they fall upon us and drag us down, or the barrenness of our inner deserts until real loneliness, fear, bewilderment and sun-madness have cast us into them. There is something huge and dark in the African world which can chew through the defences of white men who have not been harnessed to that continent’s almost mindless friendship with suffering and annihilation. Concrete buildings, clinics and city settlements can hide it, almost, but out in the wastes you never forget that the friendly hyena is there to clean you if you should die in the grey grass among the thorns. It is truly a mighty continent and you feel it when you lie down in darkness under the stars, your blanket around you, and you listen to its powerful silence, a silence made up of various small sounds become one steady background drone and clicking, of cicadas, insects of every kind, mosquitoes, all whirring and hissing in one silence peculiar to Africa.

  Of all the desiccated, bitter, cruel, sunbeaten wildernesses which starve and thirst beyond the edges of Africa’s luscious, jungled centre, there cannot be one more Christless than the one which begins at the northern foot of Mount Kenya and stretches to the foothills of Abyssinia, and from there to the dried-out glittering tip of Cape Gardafui where the hot karif winds blow in from where the long sharks race under the thin blue skin of the ocean. You can never think of those wildernesses without thinking of daggers and spears, rolling fierce eyes under mops of dusty black crinkly hair, of mad stubborn camels, rocks too hot to touch, and blood feuds whose origins cannot be remembered, only honoured in the stabbing. But of all the races of Africa there cannot be one better to live among than the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest; the Somalis.

  I knew an Italian priest who had spent over thirty years among the Somalis, and he made two converts, and it amazed me that he got even those two. The Prophet has no more fervent, and ignorant, followers, but it is not their fault that they are ignorant. Their natural intelligence is second to none and when the education factories start work among them they should surprise Africa, and themselves.

  I never saw a Somali who showed any fear of death, which, impressive though it sounds, carries within it the chill of pitilessness and ferocity as well. If you have no fear of death you have none for anybody else’s death either, but that fearlessness has always been essential to the Somalis who have had to try and survive hunger, disease and thirst while prepared to fight and die against their enemies, their fellow Somalis for pleasure in the blood feud, or the Ethiopians who would like to rule them, or the white men who got in the way for a while.

  ‘Now, take your pistol out of your belt and shoot me,’ a tall, lean, shining black Somali said to me after finishing his story. We were standing over the heap of hacked, slashed, bleeding meat which had been another Somali until this other one had dealt with him. That was the first time I had come up against this peculiar and terrific satisfaction in a killing well done and the readiness to die for it, having been caught.

  ‘You want me to shoot you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘That’s your law, isn’t it? Well, I’m ready. I’ve done what I want, so you can get on with your law. You have your pistol in your belt. Shoot me.’ His long, sharp, heavy dagger was on the sand at my feet. An Italian doctor was on his knees beside the meat with a hypodermic needle in the hope that something might still stir within the bloody mess. But no.

  ‘È finito,’ the doctor said, lighting a cigarette. He was very tired of Somalis, this doctor, having spent years amidst their electric violence. ‘Shoot him,’ he said to me. ‘It’ll save a great deal of trouble.’ The Somali really did want to die, totally satisfied with himself after waiting for this enemy for over a year. Instead of being about a camel, this death was about a woman, something of far less value than a camel. The woman was sliced up in a hut nearby, alive. She would survive, after a fashion. Every night at the same hour for ten days, the husband, the one who wanted me to shoot him, had gone to the hut and shouted a warning outside it, telling the interloper to go. They were both of a great and noble tribe, inland from Merca on the southern coast.

  ‘He would not go. He wanted to die, so I killed him,’ the tall warrior said to me. ‘I am happy.’ He pushed the dead meat with his sandalled foot, thoughtful, sombre. ‘He was stubborn,’ he said. ‘He could have gone, but he was stubborn, daring me to kill him. It was too much.’ It was the stubbornness, not jealousy over the woman, which had caused the killing; the stubbornness and the insult contained in it.

  ‘Take him away,’ I told a corporal, and as he was being handled off the scene the Somali turned, shouting, ‘You’re not going to start all that court business, are you? What’s the use of that? You’ve got your pistol. Shoot me and have done with it.’ He was trembling with anger, with impatience when he thought of the cell in the far town, the dreary court scene, the statements, the tiresome rigmarole of the legal machine far from the desert where this simple, logical thing had been done with a knife.

  Death by shooting used to be the method of execution in the early days of the occupation after the Italian collapse, Italian law followed to the letter. The Somalis died as they liked to die, contemptuously, throwing off the cloak-blanket and staring at the firing squad, sneering at the trembling rifles. They had had their fragment of living, their brief satisfaction, and they had prayed. Now die. Hrun sheg! Wallahi!

  I never knew a Somali to commit suicide, though I have been told they do it sometimes.

  The first European suicide I knew was an officer who took over a year of loneliness in an outpost to decide that he had been a failure as a soldier. He was actually a very fine and able officer, but he had given up the effort to eat at a table months before his suicide, leaving half empty cans of bully beef about his bedroom in the fort, had given up shaving (in him a terrible offence), and had come to believe that the loss of a pistol over a year before, during the campaign, was a piece of criminal negligence on his part. He wanted to be court-martialled for it, but nobody would take him seriously. Nobody bothered about a pistol in a savage territory in which the Italians had left thousands of rifles and machine-guns which had come into the hands of the tribes.

  It is almost impossible to describe the malaise, the very special weariness of spirit which isolation among fierce tribesmen brings, hundreds of miles from base, and which eats into one after the sixth month in the midst of the tension, and the hot silence. Fits of rage used to come over one after too many killings among the tribes, for one found oneself getting used to it and deciding to do nothing about it. Let them kill each other. They liked it. Yet one had to go on pretending that it mattered to one, while it did not matter to the Somalis. And there was the endless and ingenious intrigue among them, the only pleasure beside killing open to nomads in practically waterless country. At times you looked out across the silent glaring desert and began to wish you were dead, for a few minutes. With some it lasted longer than a few minutes, and they shot themselves, or went mad. I know of fifteen cases of madness in that wilderness. But the first suicide I knew did not shoot himself in his outpost. He waited until he was going on leave, and then shot himself after drawing his drink ration. None of us could find out what he was thinking of that last afternoon in Mogadishu.

  It was a Sunday, I was told months later, that he chose for his death, a hot, silent Sunday afternoon. He drove about in his truck, looking for friends, but they were all asleep, or away swimming in the sea. Perhaps the English Sunday which follows the English everywhere, perhaps even into hell, fell upon him, the grey memory of it, maybe the longing for it, like a shadow in that sunglare, for he drove off into the bush and stopped his truck at a deserted and broken Italian fort. Here he unloaded his drink ration from the truck, l
ined it up like a set of soldiers, took a piece of charcoal from an old Somali cooking fire and wrote on the wall of the fort. ‘This is the only way for a rat to die.’ Then he shot himself. Nothing very much happened about it. It was soon forgotten. It was not until about four years later, after many suicides and cases of madness, that some staff branch down in lusher Africa sent a psychiatrist up to see what was the matter in the Somali wilderness. I have a copy of his report. He did not go far beyond the towns of British Somaliland, a fairly quiet little area, never entered the real desolation, but his report said that nearly every officer was slightly to violently unbalanced.

  We were only as unbalanced as the Somalis about us. Nobody could remain sane in that arid world.

  I ran into the beginning of the end of the next suicide when I was on the last lap of a mad, frantic drive down from Cape Gardafui to Mogadishu, heading for my first leave in over a year.

  Chapter 6

  I HAD NEVER HAD any real patience, no application, had never done any inner grazing into myself, until marooned for the first time, completely marooned among the thorn scrub in the sand and shale of the Somali country. I had known loneliness in Africa before the war, but not a loneliness that got inside and rang and echoed in one as in Somalia. In Africa before the war I had hunted, worked with beasts, ridden long and hard in a kinder clime, and the Africans were not like the Somalis, the Somalis who were restless, violent, romantic, vengeful and proud.

  It was fourteen months after my arrival in Somalia before I got leave, and I can remember throwing my kit into the back of the borrowed, battered, unreliable Chev truck which had had its heart broken long ago on the trail to Addis Ababa. Askaris going on leave climbed into the back, one or two of them with the big-hipped, rolling eyed, nubile women they had picked up during their service in the Mijertein country we were now leaving. A hundred miles south of the Nogal I stopped and shot an oryx bull and we feasted on it round the fire that night. I had no liquor and I knew that I would get a drink at El Lagodei where there was a friend of mine administering that slice of purgatory. We drank thin, smoky, salty camel milk. I begrudged myself the sleeping out in the bush, the delay, and I was longing for a drink of beer, whisky, anything. I took a poll among the askaris. It was midnight, the moon huge above us on the desert. They were for moving on. We threw our kit back into the truck, dragged the snoring women out of their cover, filled the radiator, lit cigarettes, and went on, the truck bumping and rolling over the rocks, and again and again we had to get out and push the truck out of the thick sand in the tugs, the river beds which had not seen a river since long before the Prophet’s death.

  Drink never meant much to me, until I was marooned in Somalia, and has never meant as much since. I like drink, but not nearly as much as I liked it in Somalia. There were no hotels there, no pubs, no shops. You couldn’t get a drink there when you had finished your drink ration, and when you got your drink ration you drank it up as soon as you could, and then craved for more.

  Driving down to El Lagodei in that ruined Chev I was in a kind of ecstasy, a ragged second lieutenant, overdue for full lieutenanthood and twenty-eight days leave, driving farther and farther away from that fly-infested hell-hole in which one had experienced for the first time the steady, silent creep of hysteria approaching. That place in which one had learned to do one’s first inner grazing, to gaze inwards, the thinking eye, driven inwards, perhaps by the harshness of the life outside, was disappearing now as one pressed the accelerator down and stared through the approaching dawnlight for the first signs of El Lagodei fort.

  My khaki shirt, one of those early cellular well-cut shirts which vanished towards the end of the war as utility won the day, was ragged, torn, patched, and I had only one pip to wear, on my right shoulder. I had lost the other one and my left shoulder strap was buttonless anyway, hanging down in a flap. I had no stockings left and was bare-legged, wearing Somali sandals, and my shorts were ready for handing on to the company cook. I was badly in need of a haircut, and in the mood for one of those nervous-release drink parties that we in the field-force began to indulge in at that time, when we got the opportunity. During my leave I was going to buy a thousand books to take back with me to the next piece of wilderness, wherever that would be. I would order cases of gin, take drawing materials with me, steal a radio from some army dump in Mogadishu, arrange with some Italian or other to send me onions and fruit somehow on any convoy he could find going to my next piece of wilderness, and never again would I find myself without reading matter, or drink, or onions, but even then I knew, as we all did in that field-force, that after the third month in the wilderness we would be short of everything once more. And in Mogadishu I was going to seek out bread, and eat it until tired. Real bread. I could not eat another army biscuit, I thought then.

  El Lagodei. I could see the faint grey squareness of the fort away on the horizon. I could hear the askaris in the back shouting, one of them thumping on the cab roof, shouting ‘It is there. We see it. El Lagodei.’ They began to sing in the back of the truck, the thin, yelling Somali singing on five sad, haunting notes. They too wanted a fresh scene, new people, gossip in the makaya, the coffee shop in the village, women, boasting.

  I stopped the truck, paraded the askaris and let them adjust their equipment, button up their pockets, while I borrowed a safety pin from one of them and pinned up my left shoulder strap. I buckled on my web belt and pistol, hammered my side cap on the truck until all the yellow dust of the Mijertein had gone from it, put the cap on, laughed when one of the askaris said to me, ‘None of us can look smart in our rags, Effendi. But we must try.’

  ‘Will they give us decent uniforms, soon, Effendi?’ another askari asked. ‘In the Italian army we dressed far better than this,’ which was true, for the Italians had looked to the bright and dashing tastes of the Somalis in their army, going in for high fezzes with splendid badges, dashing grey cloaks, splendid bandoliers, stars and bright yellow, green and red tassels and pom-poms for the Gruppo Banda and the Dubat, those dashing irregulars who still spoke fondly of their major, Cimarutta, and proudly of Colonnello Bechis.

  ‘In wartime you wear rags,’ I said. ‘Smart rags, properly laundered when you can. The nice uniforms are for the clerks and the storemen at base.’ It was the only lie I could think of just then, having used most of the others up in the times of the sullen waiting for pay. They stood there listening to those lies, tall, black, lean, good-looking men who knew all about camels and the various tastes of the waters of widely scattered waterholes, their modello 91 rifles at the order, their grey square leather ammunition pouches which I had salvaged from dumps, starving for polish, their sandals broken and worn, a shower to look upon if I ever saw one, but a shower who could walk me off my feet in this wilderness anytime.

  The officer at El Lagodei had no drink, and he too was aching, waiting for a convoy. He showed me his transport, a smashed Chev standing on four wooden boxes, and reminded me that the Chev I was driving was his, and when would I send it back? He had somehow stolen it, and I promised I would send it back, and did, with his drink ration in the back. As time went on we of the field-force were to look after each other more and more, stealing kit, scrounging materials of all kinds, sharing loot, united in a sort of military monkhood in our outpost cells.

  I drove down through Garowei, that lonely fort in the brown barren hills of the northern Mudugh. Garowei was also drinkless, the officer there imploring me to shoot some of the staff officers for him when I got to base. He had been here six months and had had only one drink ration, and, heady and careless with joy, had drunk the lot in three nights with another officer in off patrol.

  ‘You look pretty far gone, you know,’ he said to me. ‘I hear you’re all round the bend up there at Gardafui.’ He added, before I could say it for him, ‘And I’m pretty far gone myself, I know it. I’ve begun to talk to myself. Do you ever do that?’ He looked at me keenly.

  ‘Often,’ I told him.

  ‘Do you know
the Italians never let their officers do more than three months up here?’

  ‘With a wine ration every month. Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Hundreds of bloody askaris to carry the wine ration when they went on patrol.’

  ‘Green vegetables twice a month sent up by truck.’

  ‘It’s a bloody disgrace, that’s what it is. Don’t forget to go in and raise hell about my booze ration, and my mail. I’ve got to go on a camel patrol tomorrow. I hate camels. I really hate the bastards. Ever tried to load one?’

  ‘Ever eaten one? An old one? They tell me the young camel is like chicken.’

  ‘Catch me eating a bloody camel, boy,’ he said. Yet we ate plenty of camel together a year later east of that particular piece of wilderness, and we ate it young, freshly born if possible. New-born camel was the best meat I ever ate in Somalia.

  On to Galkayu (‘The place where me White Men ran away’ – referring to a time when the Somalis repulsed an attack by European troops in the time of the Mad Mullah). It was at Galkayu that I saw the first tall cool bottles of beer in many months, proferred by a friend with a generous hand, and I sat down as I was, covered with dust, tired and sand-weary, and we began to graze each other in that special gladness of companionship known only to shagbags of that time and in that godless place.

  Chapter 7

  JOE WAS A TALL, dark, sardonic fellow, very good and fast with a rifle, very widely read, cool and able with the excitable Somalis, an old Africa hand, a few years older than me.

  ‘I’ve got a nutcase here on my hands,’ he said quietly after the second bottle of cold beer. ‘I want you to take him away for me before he opens fire on himself. He’s only loading and aiming at present, but it could get serious. He’s only been here a month but he took one look at the Shag and the Somalis and went into retirement. He’s in there.’ He pointed towards the green, paint-starved lattice-work which ran round the half walls of the room we were sitting in. ‘A good chap but more suited to the quartermaster’s store, say, or a staff job somewhere nice. Kidding apart, though, I’m worried about him. So take him down with you to Mog. This is my last chance. There’ll be no more transport to Mog for months. Be a chum, will you?’